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Homesick Quotes

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Homesick Quotes

“As she stepped through the front door onto the verandah, a warm breeze brushed her face and she felt a heavy wave of deep familiarity: the smell of eucalyptus and sunbaked dirt, the light so bright it put creases around her eyes just to look at it. The slender blue gums on the ridge, ancient and watchful. This was the landscape of her childhood and she would never be able to escape its influence. But just as Daniel Miller had brought her to Halcyon, the books that she'd read as a child, lying beneath the ferns at Darling House, had taken her to lands where trees with names like oak and chestnut and elm grew in great, ancient forests, and the soil was moist and the sun was gentle, where there were magical words like "hedgerow" and "conker," and snow kissed the glass of windows in winter, and children went sledding at Christmas and ate "pudding" and "blancmange." And so, she had come to know another landscape, not just intellectually, but viscerally: a landscape of the imagination as real to her as the geographical landscape in which she moved. When she first arrived in England as a twenty-year-old graduate, she had stepped off the plane and known it already. Standing here now, looking across the valley toward the facing hill, Jess could imagine how homesick Isabel must have felt at times. She herself had been thinking about "home" a lot. Home, she'd realized, wasn't a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of "home" wasn't "away", it was "lonely." When someone said, "I want to go home," what they really meant was that they didn't want to feel lonely anymore.”

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Book:Homecoming
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“and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness. It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness. She scoured Nigerian websites, Nigerian pro files on Facebook, Nigerian blogs, and each click brought yet another story of a young person who had recently moved back home, clothed in American or British degrees, to start an investment company, a music production business, a fashion label, a magazine, a fast-food franchise She looked at photographs of these men and women and felt the dull ache of loss, as though they had prised open her hand and taken some thing of hers. They were living her life.”

HomeRaceTravelRacismImmigrationHomesicknessHomesickEmigration
Book:Americanah
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“The Marquis stepped between Richard and Door. 'You can't go back to your old home or your old job or your old life,' he said to Richard almost gently. 'None of those things exist. Up there, you don't exist.' They had reached a junction: a place where three tunnels came together. Door and Hunter set off along one of them, the one that no water was coming down, and they did not look back. The Marquis lingered. 'You'll just have to make the best of it down here,' he said to Richard, 'in the sewers and the magic and the dark.”

HomeLostDarkAdventureHomesick
Book:Neverwhere
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“For him, England has always been a land of fairy tales: a world of pictures, of black-and-white sketches depicting pale, chubby children eating currant buns. A land of fairies and witches, hedgerows and secret gardens, goblins and magical woods. When he arrived he was surprised to find it looked almost exactly as it did in the stories. The trees, the meadows, the little brick houses. He had not come to a real country, but a story come to life. Every day, then, he woke to a fantasy. And no matter how solid and cold and uncomfortable it was, he could never feel it was a country as such, could never quite believe that it had been formed from the same molten stuff that had made his birthplace. England was always secondary, always derivative, always an aftereffect of a story. Perhaps this is why, now, he can decide to leave it.”

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Book:The Other Side of the World
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“...that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.”

Growing UpAdventureSelf DiscoveryLife ExperienceAmerican CultureTurning PointsTravelingRoad TripHauntedHomesickAmerican LiteratureWho Am IShadow SelfLost SoulStrange MomentQuest For Meaning
Author:Jack Kerouac
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“It tugs at me, filling me with the kind of seasick nostalgia that can hit you in the gut when you find an old concert ticket in your purse or an old coin machine ring you got down at the boardwalk on a day when you went searching for mermaids in the surf with your best friend. That punch of nostalgia hits me now and I start to sink down on the sky-coloured quilt, feeling the nubby fabric under my fingers, familiar as the topography of my hand.”

LoveLifePlayFriendshipLossSkyChildhoodRegretSadLaughterGuiltMemoryNostalgiaBest FriendSurfMermaidHomesickHandRingFingerQuiltConcertTicketSeasickCoin MachineKodak Moment
Book:Placid Girl
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“My stepfather, John O'Hara, was the goodest man there was. He was not a man of many words, but of carefully chosen ones. He was the one parent who didn't try to fix me. One night I sat on his lap in his chair by the woodstove, sobbing. He just held me quietly and then asked only, "What does it feel like?" It was the first time I was prompted to articulate it. I thought about it, then said, "I feel homesick." That still feels like the most accurate description - I felt homesick, but I was home.”

FeelingsFamilyDepressionWordsHomesick
Book:The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee
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“Der sker noget magisk, når mama fortæller om sin ungdom i Syrien. I et øjeblik forsvinder trætheden omkring hendes øjne. Tiden forbarmer sig over hendes ansigt, og jeg får et glimt af den unge kvinde, hun var engang. Før Danmark. Før mig. Der kommer en svag rødmen i hendes kinder, der i et kort øjeblik dækker over det, jeg ikke kan snakke om. Selv hendes stemme får en livligere klang, og hun taler, som om intet er galt. Jeg kan godt blive misundelig over, at hendes bedste dage var, før jeg blev født, men jeg har accepteret, at hjemve er en ufattelig hård konkurrent. Eftersom hun ser mig hver dag, vil jeg aldrig kunne vinde. Hun vil altid savne Syrien mere, end hun elsker mig.”

MotherFamilyHomesickImigrants
Book:Betonhjerter
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“Nostalgia is an excessive sentimentality for the past, for home. It is associated with a yearning to return to a happy and safe period in your life. The word comes from nóstos, meaning “homecoming”, and álgos, meaning “pain” or “ache”. It’s all about the “good old days”, and “the good times”. Conservatism revolves around nostalgia. All right wingers are nostalgic, and suffer from future shock and future fear. Science is about extreme nostalgia for the material atoms of the ancient Greeks. Materialism is entirely dead in the era of quantum mechanics, yet scientists go on believing in matter anyway. They are highly conservative individuals unwilling to contemplate leaving the home materialism has provided for them. The last thing they want is to end up in the Unknown Land of Mind, where thought, not matter, is core reality. That would ruin everything for the scientific materialists and empiricists.”

ScienceChangeConservativeNostalgiaResistanceMaterialismParadigmRight WingHomesickReactionary
Book:Extra Scientiam Nulla Salus: How Science Undermines Reason
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“I realized that a new phase of exile was beginning, that from now on there would be other periods, all different, each with its own anxieties, all shattering and overwhelming, and that I would be changing too, passing from one crisis to the next until I reached the moment of truth, unique and definitive — the day on which I would either stop being an exile and return home, or unavoidably, with sadness and resignation, become an immigrant.”

ExileHomesicknessHomesickImmigrantExiled
Author:Fernando Alegria
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“Zoe rubbed her forehead and grimaced. “America is one toll booth after another. In Noshahr I could park anything in front of our compound, but not in free America. I tried to buy a goat to roast. I am not going to tell you the trouble that caused.” “You can’t roast goat in America?” “You can roast,” Zoe said, “but there are certain rules about goats. And it made the neighborhood children cry. The details are too tedious for the telephone.”

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Author:Michael Benzehabe
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“But it wasn't the right season to lift off. Not yet. I sat in my apartment and looked out over the city, and I just didn't feel any passion to write about the place. I didn't give a damn about local politics; I wasn't moved by the issues. I missed home. And I was frustrated by people who actually thought the world was a centre and that centre was here. ‘The world's a sphere, everyone,’ I wanted to say. ‘The centre of a sphere doesn't lie on its surface. Look up the word 'superficial', when you have a chance.”

WritingPassionNew York CitySuperficialityHomesickSphereSurfaces
Book:Moth Smoke
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“Monkstown Hospital by Stewart Stafford My first time away from Mam, Tonsillectomy at six years old, Teddy bear fights Action Man, Pinball Pocketeer for company. Silver torch lights the dark hours, A miniscule pack of playing cards, A made-up game played undercover, My best guess of what picture follows. An older man awaits surgery too, Seeing that I'm alone and scared, He draws pictures to amuse me or, We watch "funnies" in the TV room. Waking from the operation in the bed, Congealed blood covers my pyjamas, My mother makes her shock known, We go home for my First Communion. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”

MemoryHospitalsMentorChildhood MemoriesChildhood TraumaHospitalHomesicknessHomesickOperationTonsils
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“In my own shire, if I was sad Homely comforters I had: The earth, because my heart was sore, Sorrowed for the son she bore; And standing hills, long to remain, Shared their short-lived comrade's pain. And bound for the same bourn as I, On every road I wandered by, Trod beside me, close and dear, The beautiful and death-struck year: Whether in the woodland brown I heard the beechnut rustle down, And saw the purple crocus pale Flower about the autumn dale; Or littering far the fields of May Lady-smocks a-bleaching lay, And like a skylit water stood The bluebells in the azured wood. Yonder, lightening other loads, The season range the country roads, But here in London streets I ken No such helpmates, only men; And these are not in plight to bear, If they would, another's care. They have enough as 'tis: I see In many an eye that measures me The mortal sickness of a mind Too unhappy to be kind. Undone with misery, all they can Is to hate their fellow man; And till they drop they needs must still Look at you and wish you ill.”

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Book:A Shropshire Lad
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